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In my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous experiences during my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – for instance my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I became curious if others have these peculiar situations. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Scientists have created many tests to assess the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding